Porcelain veneers are like an ultra thin shellac nail, placed over your teeth. They are permanently bonded, can lost 15-25 years with proper care, and when done correctly, they will fix your bite, improve your smile, and increase your confidence.

Common Concerns About Porcelain Veneers

People’s number one concern about porcelain is the amount of teeth being shaven down. It’s a concern because when you go on Tik Tok or instagram, you are immediately bombarded with the worst cases. Unfortunately, that’s tainted the many advancements that modern cosmetic dentistry has to offer for patients.

These benefits include the fact that nowadays, the amount of tooth reduction is as minimal as needed to get the desired result.

• For one, we cut the teeth through temporaries. This means that if there are areas of the teeth that aren’t needed to be shaved, they aren’t.
• Secondly, using good magnification, steady hand skills, as well as proper instrumentation, a good dentist will try to keep the shaving within the enamel. This means that you’re looking at 0.3-0.7mm of tooth reduction. That’s super thin.

This also means the porcelain will allow the underlying tooth to shine through. This means that it should look like a shellac nail, and since the underlying tooth shines through, the final result resembles the natural beauty that you already possess.

People don’t want to change themselves completely. They want to enhance their beauty. Working with a careful dentist, and a world class lab that is able to deliver the desires of the patient will give us a world class result.

I know there are plenty of patients that need to hear this about porcelain veneers.

The Hollywood Smile Concern

Another concern is that the Hollywood smile have to look fake. The truth is some patients want the fake look. Other patients, didn’t know that natural is even possible, since they are so used to seeing chicklet fake white teeth on instagram.

Nowadays, the lab techs are artists when it comes to tooth shape and colour. They can make the porcelain extremely thin and life like. You will think that it is literally a swhiter extension of your already beautiful tooth.

This is what gets people excited. The porcelain veneers literally looks like a better version of your tooth. Your teeth are imperfectly perfect for you. So why not use that information for your makeover. That’s exciting.

The Smile Design Process

The process for modern day smile designs is very collaborative.

We discuss your main goals and desires.

What’s really cool is that I can then use filling material directly inside your mouth, shape it, cure it and give you a rough idea of what the vision is. We can do this or do it digitally using photoshop.

Then we take pictures and video, so you get to see and visualize what your life would feel like if you were to go ahead with the smile makeover. This part is super excising because if gives patients a glimpse into what’s possible.

All this information about patients laughing, smiling, their facial expressions, jawlines. All this is taken into context when designing the actual temporaries. Patients should consider the dentist like a smile architect. Let’s say you want to build a house, first you get it drawn out on paper. In the dentist’s case we do it photoshop. Then sometimes, the architect builds a 3d model of the building.

In your case, we build you temporaries. Once there’s approval on the shape, the fit, the size, and the colour, only then do we proceed to the finals. The final will very closely resemble the temporaries, except just way more beautiful.

This process really alleviates the fear for some patients. They feel involved in the process, they feel the excitement in the progress, and then by the time the finals are in they are usually already ecstatic.

The Role of Photography

An example in smile cloud. What’s interesting is that with photography, we see light reflections off the contours of the teeth. When designing your veneers, whether it be composite or porcelain, we copy these light reflections so the shape mimics the finals.

With the DSLR photography, tooth is not a single white colour, or yellow. There’s multiple translucent layers here. You can see yellows, blues, violets, clear and opaque layers.

When we used to take selfies previously, before the phone cameras got so good, the teeth appeared white. This is because the phone didn’t pick up all the different colours of the tooth. So people used to think that hey, I want that white colour on the person, thinking that was the colour those celebrities or whoever got the veneers, chose to get.

This is unfortunate because a lot of the times, beautiful looking veneers were perceived as fake. People then also proceeded to wanting those fake white veneers, simply because they saw celebrities getting them.

Thankfully since camera quality is getting better, and photography has become such an important staple in dentistry, I strongly believe that people are starting to realize that veneers can be very natural and will blend seamlessly, if done right, for a person’s smile.

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